Aurand, Scavello debate on 'Business Matters'

Of The Morning Call

Aurand and Scavello continue to battle after cameras stop rolling

The cameras stopped rolling, but the polite hostility that ran through the debate — and several others before it — between 40th state Senate District candidates Rep. Mario Scavello and Mark Aurand continued to play out Friday.

Scavello, a six-term representative who boasts of his constituent services and announced his personal phone number during his closing remarks, jabbed Aurand for not doing the same and repeated his criticism that the Democrat is evasive.

For his part, Aurand called the Republican out again for backing out of a Monroe County League of Women Voters debate earlier this week.

Those attacks, and others during the nearly half-hour taping for the WFMZ-TV show 'Business Matters,' have played out across several debates and events, where Scavello has accuses Aurand of refusing to answer questions on taxes and Aurand accuses Scavello of flip-flopping on issues like fracking taxes and abortion.

The two are vying for a new Senate seat, created by post-census political remapping that moved the 40th District from western Pennsylvania to the Lehigh Valley and Poconos. It covers much of Northampton County north of Route 22, including the Nazareth area and Slate Belt, as well as eastern Monroe County. Those areas saw population growth between 2000 and 2010.

Scavello is a Republican from the north side of Blue Mountain, a former mayor of Mount Pocono and former chairman of the Monroe County Board of Commissioners.

Aurand, of Lower Nazareth Township, is a partner in the Allentown law firm Davidson & McCarthy, practicing commercial, business and health care law.

Scavello said he's evolved on a 5 percent tax on natural gas drillers, and he supports the tax still, but would favor companies investing in infrastructure to make natural gas more widely available to the public.

That means cheaper fuel for their homes and more money in their pockets, he said.

But going that direction would be locking the state into fossil fuels, Aurand countered, and he'd rather invest in renewable energy.

The legislature has dropped the ball by not enacting an extraction tax sooner, depriving the state of badly needed revenue, Aurand argued. The same goes with $1.2 billion in corporate and banking tax cuts during Corbett's administration, he said.

The phaseout of those corporate taxes began long before Gov. Tom Corbett took office, Scavello reminded, and were only delayed because of the economic downturn. Hopefully, he said, they'll be fully wiped out in the next two years.

"Trickle down economics, my friend; that's where it's at," he said.

It hasn't worked in Pennsylvania, Aurand countered.

"You just assume that if business are untaxed, they will magically create jobs," he said.

They disagreed on property tax reform but agreed for the need to ease the burden on property owners. Scavello supports an effort to replace school property taxes with sales and personal income taxes that Aurand argued will remove commercial properties from the calculation and leave school districts with revenue shortfalls.

That proposal merely "diverts attention from the problem that we haven't fixed it up till now," he said.

Host Tony Iannelli alluded to one of the candidates' most tense confrontations stemming from a TV ad Aurand aired accusing Scavello of co-sponsoring a controversial bill that would require women seeking an abortion to undergo an ultrasound to verify the age of the fetus and for responding to a questionnaire that he opposes abortion "in all circumstances."

Scavello's legislative staff received death threats as a result of the ad, which he said wrongly characterized his position on women's health issues.

"I am pro-life, and my feelings are pro-life, however, in this country… the decision is between a woman, her God and her doctor."

Aurand called the threats "unacceptable," but defended the ad, saying as a candidate he has a duty to talk about the issues.

"It was not a questionnaire about his personal beliefs, which I respect," Aurand said. "It was a questionnaire about what his position was as a candidate."